#5

The unexpected gift of having a sick kid and knowing you'll be spending a quiet day at home with her--the child you rarely get to spend time with alone because she's in school five days a week.  There's nothing on the calendar, you've found a substitute to help in your son's class, and the promise of a sunny day stretches out before you.

#4

The leaves along the central boulevard have started to turn.  So few trees here do it, and after living in the desert for ten years it's a bit like time travel to slowly drive under their towering limbs and watch for that solitary yellow or red that might gather its pluck and throw itself with abandon into the autumn wind, sharing its exhilaration at that final act, after waiting so long among its stolid brethren, not knowing its fate, or perhaps not caring.  Were I walking under that waning canopy of brilliance, I'd capture yet another fallen star and preserve it as a bookmark.

#3

For the sanctuary I discovered today—seemingly so far from the city yet right in the middle of it—and the family of coyotes that welcomed me as I crossed its threshold into their world, one without traffic noise, houses, or any mechanized thing.  If not for the communications towers adorning a number of the peaks, I would have thought I was truly out in the middle of the desert.  For the long moments of solitude between other hikers, for the mountains that enclose the valley and the city with the foresight to keep it wild, I am grateful.  It allowed me to fall almost in love with the desert again, like I first did 10 years ago, like I only seem to when I’m alone with it.

#2

It’s the first week of December now.  We’ve finally succumbed over Thanksgiving to turning on the heat, and still we, the adults of the house, were cold, so we had to turn it up again over the weekend.  Every year, while I swelter as the thermometer hovers around 115°, I pray for the cool weather, but this year, now that it’s arrived, I’m having a harder time acclimating.  When January temps in my hometown rose above 50°, folks went outside in their t-shirts, because it was a heat wave compared to the below-zero wind chills they’d faced through the holidays.  But 50° here is a good 50-60 degrees lower than what we faced just a few months ago, and so it is with relish that I open my winter closet and sift through sweaters, sweatshirts, scarves and gloves, and start cladding myself in layers that I can shed as the winter sun warms the house and car throughout the day.  This wrapping and unwrapping, this daily shift from cold to warm and back again, the welcoming of the sun, finally, after months of ruing it, the rediscovery of favorite clothes that cloak me from the wind while I watch the children, still shoeless, play carefree in the yard, it’s a blessing.

#1

For the birds who congregate every morning on the wires above a particular alley in my neighborhood.  There are dozens, scores of them, all lined up and screeching in some sort of morning coffee clatch.  And on rare occasion, you can see them all lift off, one at a time but within milliseconds of each other, and swoop in one great burst of clattering feathers through the sky, among the rooftops, and they remind you that life is a series of miracles, that everything is alive and the center of its own universe, bumping up against yours and sometimes, when you’re lucky, crossing one another’s thresholds.

Gratitudes

It’s becoming tradition that some friends use the month of November and impending Thanksgiving to identify things in their daily lives, both large and small, that they are thankful for, and post them on social media.  It seems to me like a good practice regardless of the month, and whether you manage to record it daily or not.  Since my time and focus for writing longer posts is limited, this seems like a good place to record my own gratitudes.

The Weave of the Big Picture

A guest post today from Jonah Halfpenny:

I was in a yoga session this morning—this is something my sister and I have been doing since we started training with Amos. He is a master of many martial arts, but before he will train us in any of those, he says we must learn to center ourselves though meditation, and that yoga is a form of active meditation. We had done poses for nearly an hour, and my body was exhausted.

photo courtesy of openskyyoga.com

When we relaxed into our resting pose, lying silently on our backs, something he said weeks before came back to me. That our bodies are limited, but the soul is limitless. The soul contains the entire world. We are expansive. We are everyone and everything. When he said it the first time, it reminded me of Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”—my sister is a book fanatic and had given me his book Leaves of Grass to read. It was one of the few belongings I brought with me when we moved across the continent to live with our great aunt. So the idea of being expansive made sense; I liked the notion when I read Whitman, and liked hearing it echoed by my teacher. But today I actually felt it for the first time.

Lying there, motionless and exhausted, with my eyes closed, I actually felt something inside me expand, felt as though the whole world really did dwell inside me, and what amazed me was that it felt so peaceful. I thought it was so strange, that a world so full of turmoil, war and violence, greed and suffering, could feel so whole and right inside one little person.

I’m not sure what to make of it yet. But it’s worth exploring. Maybe it’s the difference between seeing news reports of rebels with machine guns and seeing an astronaut’s picture of earth from above—when you take something as a whole, the details fade into the weave of the big picture. I hope this is just the beginning. I’ll report back if I ever figure it out.